This disclosure relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to presenting content to users of a social networking system via a feed.
Users of a social networking system share their interests and engage with other users of the social networking system by sharing or generating content items such as photographs, status updates, and playing social games. While this allows users to easily exchange information with other social networking system users, the amount of information gathered from users is staggering. This causes a social networking system to receive a large amount of information from users describing a wide range of events ranging from events including recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like, as well as more mundane content such as status messages, information about what music has been listened to by users, and recent check-in events at coffee shops.
A social networking system presents various content items to a user based on the information it receives from other users. For example, the social networking system presents a user with content items describing various actions performed by other social networking system users. Additionally, entities (e.g., a business) may present content items to online system users via the feed of content item along with the content items based on information received from other users to gain public attention for products or services or to persuade social networking system users to take an action regarding products or services provided by the entity. Because of the large amount of information received by a social networking system, a limited number of content items may be presented to a user. Because users often use different devices and/or applications, such as web browsers, with different display characteristics to view feeds provided by social networking systems, content items and advertisements in a feed appear in different sizes on different devices. This may cause a feed presented to users to be differently presented by different client devices.